Nasa Apollo 11 Moon Landing Restored Videos

Remember a few weeks ago I talked about the discovery of some video from Apollo 11 that even in its state of deterioration, had some images of the first moon walks that were far superior than NASA archives? Well here they are!

Complete Daily Galaxy article

Lost Apollo 11 footage found!!!

Everyone is familiar with the images of Neal Armstrong exiting the Eagle LEM. Mostly dark and blurry almost unrecognizable except for the bulky humanoid on the screen. The really disappointing fact about the first few moments of Armstrong's excursion was that it didn't HAVE to be that bad. During that short segment, NASA was panicking. The picture should have been much clearer. NASA was receiving the Luna images through the Goldstone tracking facility. Unfortunately Goldstone's settings were wrong leading to a badly degraded signal. To make matters worse, by the time the error was discovered, Armstrong had decided to start the historic walk early, leaving the United States receivers below the horizon.

These blurry images were thought to be the only images surviving of the historic walk. In Australia however, radio telescopes were being used to pickup and forward the signals to the States. Recordings were made but the film was lost in archives for many years and was badly damaged when found. What the rediscovered footage uncovers though in a few short minutes is much much clearer images that many are saying are some of the best footage of the walk. Historians and astronomers that have viewed the films said the unseen minutes were the "best quality of Armstrong descending the ladder."


Discovery News article
Boing Boing article

The Apollo 11 speech that we NEVER heard!

Steve M. sends in an article from Space.com concerning a speech or better a contingency speech concerning Apollo 11 that then president Nixon would have given had their been a catastrophic failure of the moon landing system.

This extraordinarily unsettling speech was written for Nixon to read if the Eagle had crashed and left Armstrong and Aldrin marooned on the lunar surface with no hope of rescue.

The document was found in the national archives some 30 years after the successful lunar mission.

read the complete article and the speech here

Ten Things You Didn't Know About the Apollo 11 Moon Landing

Since the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 is at hand, Shaun Saunders thought it appropriate to send in some links and articles. Here are 10 things you might not have known about concerning that historic event.

1. The Apollo’s Saturn rockets were packed with enough fuel to throw 100-pound shrapnel three miles, and NASA couldn’t rule out the possibility that they might explode on takeoff. NASA seated its VIP spectators three and a half miles from the launchpad.

2. The Apollo computers had less processing power than a cellphone. (Shaun had a good point on this score. He wrote: "I think point No. 2 is far too generous - with what - 64K? - I reckon that they had far less processing power than a modern mobile phone. " and actually both sides are basically true. But you have to understand that the computers for the L.E.M. and S.M. were one offs custom made with ballistic rockets in mind. The software was custom written and for the most part was entered by hand as needed. The were not like computers today, they were built for one purpose only. They were also extremely fault tolerant, not like today's computers that if you look at them sideways they stop working. Remember the first personal computers ran extremely well on far less memory. My first had four kilobytes and could word process and play games etc. So by comparison the L.E.M.'s computer was 16 times more powerful than anything else out there in it's day!)

3. Drinking water was a fuel-cell by-product, but Apollo 11’s hydrogen-gas filters didn’t work, making every drink bubbly. Urinating and defecating in zero gravity, meanwhile, had not been figured out; the latter was so troublesome that at least one astronaut spent his entire mission on an anti-diarrhea drug to avoid it.

4. When Apollo 11’s lunar lander, the Eagle, separated from the orbiter, the cabin wasn’t fully depressurized, resulting in a burst of gas equivalent to popping a champagne cork. It threw the module’s landing four miles off-target.

5. Pilot Neil Armstrong nearly ran out of fuel landing the Eagle, and many at mission control worried he might crash. Apollo engineer Milton Silveira, however, was relieved: His tests had shown that there was a small chance the exhaust could shoot back into the rocket as it landed and ignite the remaining propellant.

6. The "one small step for man" wasn’t actually that small. Armstrong set the ship down so gently that its shock absorbers didn’t compress. He had to hop 3.5 feet from the Eagle’s ladder to the surface.

7. When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle's door because there was no outer handle.

8. The toughest moonwalk task? Planting the flag. NASA’s studies suggested that the lunar soil was soft, but Armstrong and Aldrin found the surface to be a thin wisp of dust over hard rock. They managed to drive the flagpole a few inches into the ground and film it for broadcast, and then took care not to accidentally knock it over.

9. The flag was made by Sears, but NASA refused to acknowledge this because they didn’t want "another Tang."

10. The inner bladder of the space suits—the airtight liner that keeps the astronaut’s body under Earth-like pressure—and the ship’s computer’s ROM chips were handmade by teams of “little old ladies.”

These facts come to us from Craig Nelson while researching his new book, Rocket Men (Viking; $28) via popsci.com.